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Dated 29 April 2013: Spring 2013 initial impressions

Man and Old Man
The Hustler.

The preseason buzz for spring 2013 seemed fairly pessimistic. (Sort of seems that way more often than not lately.) Thankfully, this quarter is shaping out to be pretty decent, at least through the first third of the cour. I guess I was looking forward to Death Billiards from the name alone—turns out it's another excellent Anime Mirai short movie, by the way—and that show about giants eating people, and the second season of Railgun, so it's not as if I believed spring 2013 would be a total write-off. It turns out there are at least a couple of gems and one shiny rock to admire.

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Dated 6 May 2013: Objectively ranking anime

Emi
I wonder how long Emi is going to keep that bandage?

For the past few years now I've kept a running update of anime rankings, mostly for use in spamming IRC. At the season's end, I also use those rankings to determine each show's position in my season summaries. This season, I've started keeping a spreadsheet on Google Drive, illustrating the changes in episode-by-episode rankings on charts. At the same time, I still maintain my IRC list of show rankings, based entirely on how I subjectively feel shows compare against other titles within the same cour.

Eren
Making the impossible possible since 850.

The newfangled spreadsheet is ostensibly objective, but the data that goes into it is still derived subjectively since all the figures come from how I personally score episodes on a linear scale of one to five. What I've noticed though is that the rankings determined via the spreadsheet method don't necessarily agree with my overall subjective rankings. For example, at this point I currently consider Hataraku Maou-sama! to be the best show of the season, mostly because Shingeki no Kyojin has had some pretty annoying Ellen moments, and because Suisei no Gargantia—although consistently good—has not had as many bits that wowed me.

Amy and Pinion
"Not entirely stable? I'm glad you're here to tell us these things."

But looking at the spreadsheet experiment, Maou-sama! should be tied for second based on median scores or arithmetic means. If comparing geometric means, then it's no longer tied with Attack on Titan, but it's still in second place behind Gargantia, the undisputed leader. Does this mean anything other than that opinions are opinions? I suppose not, but I wonder if some people would be tempted to game the scores to correct for what is arguably a flaw in methodology (or I guess philosophy).

Dated 4 June 2013: Hideauze is a dish best served cold

Catelyn.
Even the band must face the music.

Although it is not anime, Game of Thrones attracts many of the same fans. As such, the outrage over the penultimate season-three episode somewhat overshadowed the near contemporaneous shock some fans felt this week over Suisei no Gargantia episode nine. (Not the ones who saw this coming from a league away, but some viewers nonetheless.)

Melty
Looking for love in all the wrong places.

I am, of course, referring to Melty's inexplicable ongoing inability to find a partner with whom to mate despite her open enthusiasm for courtship rituals and her eye for desirable phenotypes. It also doesn't help that she has drastically reduced the size of her available population by joining the squid-squishing diaspora comprised of greedy seabed scavengers and other folk hoping to avert certain death when Team Rocket rapes and pillages the fleet after learning its command now lies in the hands of a myopic 22-year-old girl who appears to have achieved supreme executive power largely thanks to nepotism.

P.S. Pooterballs are made out of people! [Spoilers]